Join us at PAMLA 2025 for the PAMLA Forum: Contemporary Literary Palimpsests on Friday, November 21 (11:35 am–12:50 pm) in Grand Ballroom B/C (3rd floor). This special forum applies the concept of the palimpsest to recent literature and culture, showcasing new approaches to memory, layering, and rewriting.
Featured presentations include:
-
Iliana Cuellar (UC Riverside) — Theorizing the Palimpsext
Cuellar develops a theory of the “palimpsext” as a network of women’s cultural productions in dialogue with one another. Building on Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa, she explores polyvocal practices that resist silencing and reimagine intertextuality through feminist perspectives. -
Michael P. Moreno (Green River College) — The East-West Urban Palimpsest: Tracing Literary Layers in San Francisco’s Chinatown
Moreno examines Kathryn Ma’s The Chinese Groove (2023), showing how San Francisco’s Chinatown functions as a cross-cultural palimpsest where East-West histories and identities are negotiated and transformed. -
Thomas Leitch (University of Delaware) — A Culture of Forgetting
Leitch considers how contemporary American culture may be driven not by collective memory but by collective forgetting, moving from political discourse to technologies of memory and the limits of cultural recall.
This year’s forum invites attendees to think across literature, politics, space, and culture through the lens of the palimpsest, engaging with the PAMLA 2025 theme Memory and Oblivion.
RSVPs requested but not required to attend this forum; please log into pamla.ballastacademic.com and register via the Registration tab so we can better anticipate attendance numbers.